Just a Blog by Just Rhianna

I was on the hunt today in full research mode. There are few things that please me more than solving problems. I live for this my geekiness gravitates towards unsolvable problems that others would run from, whether that be in my personal life or work life the harder to solve the more blissful.

My mentor and dear friend Edward J. Bleser at Brookhaven Laboratory when I was a mere geek in teen clothing enlightened me on this. I am sure I have mentioned it before on this blog but it has held true for me since that first summer as a high school student doing a research internship. Ed said to me, “Now Rhianna, you see we don’t know the answer. This world wide web is new and like everything scientific we just need to keep searching for answers….(or something to that effect it was almost 20 years ago now that he said this to me.) ..you are here so that we can put you in a round, dark room without any windows, doors or tools except your mind to find your way out!”

As you might imagine this both frightened and intrigued me a 16 year old girl being given the knowledge that it didn’t matter how I solved problems they gave me as long as I made it work. And so this is what I have been doing in my career and life in general since.

Back to today, a colleague of mine a senior developer on my team was desperate to find a solution to a request a client made. He found a fantastic solution indeed a set of controls to use in C# that would grant any GUI (graphical user interface) wishes the client could ever have, drag and drop, inline editing, .docx formatting and much more. Unfortunately the dream controls came with a hefty price tag that just could not be justified considering our current need though I must say I will be keeping that URL in my favorites filed under DREAM TOOLS. I guess I will share it with you since I really do plan on researching into this product much more thoroughly when I have the time: http://www.devexpress.com/Subscriptions/DXperience/WhatsNew2012v1/index.xml?page=38 you can also find them on twitter: @DevExpress http://twitter.com/devexpress

If only they would sell me the one control instead of the whole package I would be a very happy geek.

It’s been a long day of conference calls, mentoring, coding, and bruised knees. Time to unwind to some tunes on Pandora, make macaroni and cheese for the kids, have a Guinness, do some laundry and maybe play a little World of Warcraft.

OK I forgive you IE temporarily even though I was only using you because I was testing to see how something looked to make sure my firefox/chrome optimized page for work didn’t get broken by your poor CSS choices and it was really word press that I have to thank for saving my precious post as a draft!